New Website - Un-natural link warning with 2 weeks of going live

[makeusawebsite]

I have a customer who has a website, 8 years old.  The business has changed, and he has launched a new website (and sub-business_ to handle a particular service.  As such the main website will no longer be handling the new service.  For purpose of example;

The service in question had it's own are set aside on his website, so what we have done is to 301 that part of the site (a single URL) to the homepage of his new website.

Old Business Site
    Service 1
    Services 2 (301 to new site)
    Service 3

New Business Site

This worked well, and within a week his new site was gaining traffic for the service keyword.

However, we have now had a un-natural link wartning in webmaster tools.

The old page on the old site had minimal links to it (around 400).  It had a page authority of 42, and 142 linking domains.

The new website has been live a few weeks now, and has had 3 links to it, all genuine.

He was on page one for the new business name, and is now page 6.

Has anyone else ever seen this happen, and how should we deal with it.  We could of course remove the 301 redirect and put in a recon-request, but the 301 seems like thje right thing to have done, and is genuine.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

[makeusawebsite]

John,

That wouldn't quite work in this situation.

The OLD website is still very much an active functioning site.... its is just one service which has been split into another company.  So for example... we only want to redirect;

www.oldwebsite.com/servicename

to the NEW website.

I could of course just edit the old page and say ...."click here to go to the new site"..... but it does wind me up somewhat that the ideal solution, and proper way to do it is a 301.... but if we do it they get put under penalty.

The official Google line about doing what we want to do is a 301 redirect..

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html

To quote them "It’s important to redirect all users and bots that visit your old content location to the new content location using 301 redirects."

I wonder if a cross-domain canonical would be worth doing?

[dohertyjf]

Awesome to hear, David! The power of our collective minds

What I'd recommend is this:

• Redirect all the pages on your site to the homepage;
• Put up a splash page saying that the site has moved with a nofollowed link to the new site;
• Do something to make the customers smile - discount code, video of a puppy, something like that.

[makeusawebsite]

A special thanks to John for his advice on this issue.

To update you.... I submitted a site-map of the OLD website to Google via WMT.  Hoping this would encourage a re-crawl and that Google would see the 301 was no longer in place.  I then put in another recon request.

Thankfully the penalty has now been removed and I just had email confirmation this morning.

My quandary now is how we redirect from the old site to the new one.

To my mind a 301 redirect is the right way to do it.... but obviously we can't do this again.  A 302 would serve the purpose of redirecting users to the new site (which is what we want to do), but obviously a 302 is not the right way to do it.

Any advice or ideas on how we should take people from the old site to the new one?

[makeusawebsite]

Thanks John, I have just emailed.

[dohertyjf]

Gotcha. Would you mind DMing me the URL so I can have a look? Also, a list of any URLs that might be redirected into the site.

[makeusawebsite]

Yes their traffic dropped by around 90%.  Its a brand new website and it ranked very quickly after launch when we put the 301 in place.

After peanty they went from position 4/5 for the main keyword to currently position 99.  It is site-wide so affecting everything.  The brand name they rank outside the top 50.

[dohertyjf]

David -

I'm assuming you saw a traffic drop when you received the unnatural links warning? And is it a partial match or a sitewide penalty?

I'm not convinced that you always need to worry about a warning. If you see a traffic drop, then definitely. Otherwise, why not go do good SEO and create useful stuff that will rank instead of spending all this time worrying about a message that didn't affect you adversely?

[makeusawebsite]

To update this thread again;

After removing the 301 redirect, we put in a reconsideration request.  To my amazement it was declined as they felt the site still had too many un-natural links.

Within webmaster tools the site is showing just 57 links.

The domain is only a few months old, and I'm not sure what else I can do as we haven't actually built any links and the 301 redirect is gone.

[makeusawebsite]

Just to update this thread.  I have removed the 301, and I am going to leave it a week before putting a recon in.

[TomRayner]

Hi David

Without looking at the backlink profile of either domain I can't be certain, but it very much looks like that 301 redirect has brought about the penalty.

It doesn't matter if there are 30 bad links or 30000, if a Google quality reviewer believes the backlinks are poor quality, you run the risk of being penalised.  I wonder whether you are seeing all of the links at the moment - it might be worth using the Link Detox tool for a more comprehensive backlink audit than Open Site Explorer can offer.  This may reveal more poor quality links.

But it sounds like you're pretty confident that the 301 redirect has caused the penalty.  Rightly or wrongly, I'm afraid it's not up to us to judge what links are "bad", it's Googles.  So while you and I may think the old backlinks are OK, Google may take a different view.  I would also rule out any chance the penalty may have become because of an influx of new links (via the 301) - having set up a number of new websites and redirected old domains (with hundreds of thousands of links) I've never seen this trigger a penalty by itself.

I'd put your theory to the test and remove the 301 and send a reconsideration request detailing you have done so.  From what I can tell, that would remove the penalty.  Run a deeper audit of your backlinks to see if yet-to-be-revealed bad links are present.  And if you really want some authority links from other websites to pass through to the new domain, contact them manually and ask them to update their URLs.

Hope this helps